We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Kevin Williamson: The New Royals- Princesses, peas, and the emotional needs of chickens:

As in the case of the princess in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1835 story, so sensitive that she could feel the pea under 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds, acute dissatisfaction with the tiniest, most ridiculous little details of life is how 21st-century progressives communicate to the world that they are indeed the new royalty, with sensibilities finer than those known to mere commoners. No normal, mentally healthy adult human being actually gives a good and sincere goddamn about the “emotional needs of chickens.” But that sort of posing, along with such daft enthusiasms as foie-gras horror, wetting oneself liberally over the fact that Bradley Manning’s Wikipedia page identified him as “Bradley Manning” for a full eleven minutes after he declared that he wants to be called “Chelsea,” sneering at SUVs and roomy suburban homes, insisting that Melissa McCarthy is a comic genius, using the word “mansplaining,” being terrorized by “thigh gaps” in advertisements, fretting about “micro-aggressions” — all of it is a way of saying, “Look at me! I went to a good school! (Or am truly at heart the sort of person who might have!)” There is a term for this that is uncharitable but cannot be improved upon: status-whoring. The old status symbols may have been shallow; the new ones are shallow, destructive, and a great deal less fun to drive.

Putting it simply, in an embedded peasant economy, when the unit of production and consumption is the family household, it is sensible to have as large a family as possible, to work the land and to protect against risk in sickness and old age. To increase reproduction is to increase production. Yet as Jack Caldwell and others have shown, when the individual becomes integrated into the market, when wealth flows down the generations, when the cost of education and leaving for an independent economic existence on an open market occurs, children become a burden rather than an asset. In other words, capitalistic relations combined with individualism knocks away the basis of high fertility, and if this is combined with a political and legal security so that one does not have to protect oneself with a layer of cousin, the sensible strategy is to have a few children and to educate them well.

A low-pressure demography means that a society avoids the situation where extra resources are automatically absorbed by population expansion. As Malthus argued, the only force strong enough to stand against the biological desire to mate and have children, was the even stronger social desire to live comfortably and avoid poverty.

With all due respect to the kiddies now running the world, and as the father of six kids themselves now grandparents, I don't want to be part of a culture where children are a burden, and I won't be for much longer.

So your kids down to great grandkids all contributed to the family business? None left the home to develop independent economic lives without first repaying your investment by helping on the farm or factory?

If not, then your children were an economic burden, a financial liability. Children are one of the leading causes of poverty.

This does not mean that you and their mother did not find them of non-financial value worthy of your continued spending of your income and wealth upon them as a consumptive good. It is good that you were wealthy enough to be able afford that. But your kids, grandkids and great-grandkids have no enforceable obligation to return the favor by sharing their wealth or to even acknowledge your existence.

Children are an economic burden, a liability, but fortunately one that few must consider barring abject poverty and, now, collapse of public welfare.

Where does our friggin' president get the right to spend taxpayer money sending people to community college? For that matter, where does the Constitutional give him the right to do 90% of what he does? Did Congress just disappear some where along the his reign?

Turns out the kids aren't learning their lesson while serving their 12 year sentence in government institutions. That's up from the original 5, then 6, then 9, now 12 years mandatory sentencing. So, they've got to add on a couple more years, at first, just for those who wish to remain in the institutions, but, who knows, in a decade, it may become a mandatory sentence.

But as machines assume more and more of the "drudge" work, the features that gave the young a leg up on employment, strength and endurance are less valuable. Since 1960, knowledge and experience has become more valuable as seen in the renumeration of older workers as the movement of that demographic to a an older age bracket.

More school is a ham-fisted manner to try to map the anachronistic way of teaching the young on a world in need of workers with real, up to date knowledge, good work skills and experience. The alternative is to promote freedom of thought among the young and independence of action. There are a lot of people in the political/academic spheres who depend on keeping people compliant and passive.

I have nothing against states offering advanced education as it is a state's right to do so if taxpayers so vote. Some high schools in my state that have students needing more challenging classwork allow them to attend local community colleges for part of their studies. (I'm not certain how the dollars are worked out.)

However, when most 12th graders cannot read beyond the level of 7th graders (if that) and certainly have not mastered basic math, I wonder if His Royal Highness and Court Jester Duncan should be day dreaming about such lofty goals. Neither dented the downturn in educational progress after spending millions in Chicago during their tenures in multiple positions advocating for students and social justice in the school room.

The problem is His Grace throws out some highfaluting idea that is immediately picked up by the Black Grievance Community seeking more money and jobs for their constituency, but lacking any educational value leading to a job outside the NBA or gangsta rap. Given some of the teachers I've encountered in the elementary and high schools who can't speak the King's English, I'm amazed we have students passing 7th grade grammar and composition. Oh, I forgot, students don't parse sentences and write essays anymore.

What will be interesting to the the answer to cui bono? I doubt it will be the students, more likely all those unemployed lit majors, professional students, teacher unions, bureaucrats, etc that are Obama's base.

Obummer thinks you end wars by leaving them. Mattis says the enemy has a vote. Mattis is right. Our leaving Afghanistan before the enemy is defeated means they have won. In the end, their influence will continue and ours will end. The things our soldiers (and the loyal Afghan soldiers) fought and died for will not be accomplished and their deaths and the expense will have been in vain. That doesn't mean we (the US) lost the war, but only that we didn't win it.

Hostage takers have been killed. They are now with their respective 72 virgins--a whole gross. Where do they get these girls? Seems like there should be a shortage by now. I would think that after 6 or 7 virgins one might think about hiring a pro.

It's great news that these dirtbags were killed. However, I think a lot of this would never happen if it were publicized that ALL military and police bullets will be dipped in pig blood (a la Pershing).

Thie video in that link recounts how the NYT thinks the real tragedy from the killing of 12 Frenchmen by Muslims is that the anti Muslim parties might become more powerful. The fact that twelve people had died didn't seem to carry much weight. It reminds me of when Daniel Ortega was closing down news papers in Nicaragua and the Demoncrats who supported him wrote him a letter asking him to stop doing that because it made it hard for them to support him. Those Demoncrats showed they were (are still) essentially Communists, but at least they wanted Ortega not to be so overtly anti democratic. But the NYT doesn't even bother lamenting the fact that there is a (large) contingent of Muslims who support the actions of the killers.

The other point from that link that I think is important is that those on the left want us to travel down the same road as those in Europe have been for the last few decades. The results of that are unambiguously bad in every European country - from ignoring common criminality to ignoring mass rape to mass murder.

I am a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. In fact, I am a member of the Antiochian Orthodox jurisdiction, which is based out of Damascus Syria. We sometimes informally refer to ourselves as the Arab Christian church, since it is the primary Christian church for the entire middle east. I joke that while I am ethnically American (German-Swiss-Norwegian), I am liturgically Arab (actually no different than Greek, Russian, or any other orthodox). Here in the Chicago area, all the Christians I have met that were born in the middle east call themselves Arab. So I don't know what to make of the headline on your link that says "Christians in the Holy Land: Don’t Call Us Arabs".

Pres. Obama might want to look at the success rate of community colleges before he starts paying for them. The City Colleges of Chicago from 2009 to 2013 had an average of 46,000 full time students each year. Throughout those years they awarded between 2200 and 3700 AA degrees. They also awarded about 6000 "certificates" a year, but I have no idea what those are.

If we are going to pump taxpayer money in to the schools, the schools need to be accountable to the taxpayer - and that means actually educating people with knowledge, not indoctrinating them with propaganda.

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